During the last week of August, we’ve held an “Innovation Week”, where the goal was for the team to get inspired, see and explore new things, and be fully dedicated to developing and improving our internal products.

Each morning, one of us would choose an inspirational video to set the mood for the day. It was really fun to see which video each one choose and why. As a result we started to populate our Facebook page with these inspirational videos, so that others can get inspired as well.

For the kickoff a board was used, with the areas of improvement we wanted to work on; as we shared it with the team, we asked for new ideas, and what each one would like to work on. We didn’t want to specifically assign tasks, but rather for each person to choose what they would like to work on.

Myself, I decided to start on the WP Conference Theme, with improvements to our online shop checkout process;  we had clients reporting that they couldn’t find the download link for the theme, so I changed the process for them to receive it directly via e-mail. It may not seem much, but this particular issue accounted for a lot of our customer support requests, and since we’ve implemented it this way, no one ever complained about it again.

Dylan was working on our new identity prior to that week and so set himself to make improvements on the last version he had designed, based on everyone’s feedback;  we now have the best logo ever 🙂 He actually did a great quiz about WidgiLabs and was able to “get us” and what we want for the brand. Some of the questions he used were: “If WidgiLabs was a food dish which one would it be?”. We came to the conclusion it could very well be a nice “shellfish rice”. Great fun that morning.

Nuno and Bruno were dedicated to pyevent, our new product. We decided on a name, a logo and website, and also internal procedures for the registration process; it was extremely productive. If you’re organising an event, be it a conference, meetup, workshop, and so on,  get ready, because we will make your life much much easier.

I am more goal oriented, and I must confess that by Wednesday I was stressing out a bit, everything was yet to be finished, and I was starting to feel that we wouldn’t have much by Friday. I was totally wrong; we had new logo, a better version of WP Conference, a new product. Looking back, how the hell did we manage all this in one week?

More importantly we grew as a team, got to know each other a little better and started something new; we started shaping up our culture, what we want WidgiLabs to be, and where we want to go. We also realized that innovation week must be every week.

Get inspired, do great things and remember software can be fun!